Introducing Wellness Metrics!
In addition to the activity tracking/photo-uploading/competition goodness that is Walker Tracker already, I’m extremely pleased to say that Walker Tracker now supports six other modes.
- Nutrition
- Water intake
- Mood
- Sleep (can be synced automatically from a number of providers)
- Heart rate (resting)
- Weight (can be synced automatically from a number of providers)
All of these metrics are PRIVATE. They are not shown to your fellow employees, and they are not shown to your employer or program administrator. However, aggregate data (if there are enough people to show it) is shown.
Our Wellness Metrics philosophy
With all of our metrics, we focus on providing best-practices, tips, and educational content. We believe, of course, that tracking one’s data is exceedingly useful, but only within a framework where there’s a very clear understanding of the benefits of doing so, and with clear, science-based studies to back it up. Each metric has a library of wellness content that accompanies it. We approached each of these modes with a certain philosophy that I’d like to talk about.
- Nutrition. Tracking one’s calories is painful, difficult, and not particularly effective, in our opinion. For this reason, we created the simplest tracker available. It asks you to rate your daily meals on a scale of one to ten. You already have a sense of how you ate, and how much you ate, and we believe that subjective feeling is more important than an objective, quantitative number. Our job is to allow you to track that ‘feeling’ — and to use the space available to us to provide tips for improvement with leading nutritional research.
- Water. Water tracking is another metric that we feel is over-emphasized. We have a very accurate sensory system installed in our bodies called ‘thirst’. Second: the color of one’s urine is probably the most important indicator of whether we’re drinking enough water. Water intake need varies considerably based on what foods one eats in a day, the temperature, one’s weight and body type, etc. We do allow the logging of water — but up to a certain limit. We do not want to make water-logging a competitive errr water sport.
- Mood. Rate your mood from one to five
— this is nice from a data point of view. But human moods are wide-ranging and subtle. This is why we allow you to tag your mood as well.
- Weight. Weight-tracking is good! We’re in favor. This can be hooked up to your device’s provider, so it will come over auto-magically. We allow a data point once per day — don’t forget that weight varies all day long, and so we encourage you to look over longer time-periods here. Consequently, if you’re using points, you get points once per week for logging your weight.
- Heart. Resting heart rate is what we measure. Close your eyes, think calm, and record your best. We’re tracking the rest trend, here.
- Sleep. This can also be hooked up to your device’s provider, so it will come over auto-magically. We track only the total time per night, not your wakes/sleeps. We believe that knowing how to achieve better sleep is far more useful than knowing *how well* you slept. A subjective measure of sleep trumps, in our opinion, the objective data points.
Privacy
At Walker Tracker, we’re very concerned with privacy, and want to be as transparent as possible with where your data goes and who has access to it.
Individual data points from ALL of these Wellness Metrics are absolutely private. Your program administrator doesn’t see them. We don’t see them. It’s for your use only (though you can earn points by logging them). That said: We provide aggregate data for administrators if there’s enough entries to ensure the data is randomized.
We’re very excited about the new Wellness Metrics. Let us know what you think!